Uncategorized
pronald | June 13, 2012Over the past 16 years, vast plantings of transgenic crops producing insecticidal proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) have helped to control several major insect pests and reduce the need for insecticide sprays. Today, a report in Nature shows that planting of BT crops is also associated with an increase of ladybirds, lacewings and spiders, which are natural enemies of certain pests that harm the crop.
On the basis of data collected from 1990 to 2010 at 36 sites in six provinces of northern China, the authors show a marked increase in abundance in these three arthropods…
pronald | June 13, 2012#GMOFAQ: Transferring genes from one species to another is neither unnatural nor dangerous
jdupuis | June 13, 2012
PeerJ Press Release
Scholarly Publishing 2012: Meet PeerJ
New Publishing Venture Gives Researchers Control Over Access
PeerJ launches open access into a new realm
An interview with the founders of PeerJ, an innovative new academic publishing startup.
PeerJ launches & More PeerJ musings
New OA Journal, Backed by O’Reilly, May Disrupt Academic Publishing
Pay (less) to publish: ambitious journal aims to disrupt scholarly publishing
Journal offers flat fee for ‘all you can publish’
New front in "open access" science publishing row
PeerJ
PeerJ Raises $950K from Tim O’Reilly’s Ventures To…
lborkowski | June 12, 2012by Kim Krisberg
When an explosion on the BP-operated drilling rig Deepwater Horizon caused what would be the worst oil spill in U.S. history, Glenda Perryman's friends and neighbors answered the call for clean-up workers.
Perryman lives in Lucedale, MS, about 45 minutes from the Gulf Coast — "we're in the middle of nowhere...and there's no jobs in George County," she said. So when the call for clean-up workers went out, residents in and around George County decided to take BP up on the offer. As Perryman told me, "they quit their jobs at Wal-Mart and McDonald's for better pay and went down…
gregladen | June 12, 201250 years ago today, three men did the impossible. They escaped from Alcatraz. They may or may not have lived.
Apparently, the promise was made that if they escaped, lived, then continued to live, they would return today. There are people waiting on Alcatraz today, including the sister of one of the men. So, we'll see.
Mean time, here's the trailer from the movie, "Escape from Alcatraz";
In case you were interested in escaping from Alcatraz yourself, you could try this:
And finally, the MythBusters tackled the story and here's what they came up with:
_______________________
Photo by…
gregladen | June 12, 2012Over the last couple of years I've added contacts to Linked In with a certain amount of consideration. In other words, I've added only links that are "real" in some sense; they are friends and friends of friends, and colleagues and colleagues of colleagues who's name I recognized. Then, yesterday, my password was published on the internet. That's now been changed, but again, it is effort I've expended.
I've gotten no benefit from being on Linked In. So far, I've spent time, and I've been at risk but with no reward.
Why am I here and why should I stay? Anybody know?…
aardvarchaeology | June 10, 2012Here are three podcasts reporting from the Berlin World Skeptics Conference that took place 18-20 May, all featuring yours truly among others.
Skeptikerpodden (in Swedish)
Token Skeptic (in 'Stralian)
Hoaxilla (in German and English)
sastyk | June 7, 2012I really wish I could share pictures of K. and C., who are having their first farm springtime, complete with baby goats, dam building in the creek, their own gardens, finding nests of newly hatched chicks, catching toads and salamanders, eating salads made with wild greens they collect themselves, but that would violate their privacy. Still, I think I can give you at least a sense of the Hun-like decimation of food that goes on in my house with six little guys - they all stuck their hands in over the jambalaya to show how a pan the size of Idaho makes just over one meal:
Meanwhile the…
gregladen | June 6, 2012He was one of the first authors (other than the likes of Dr. Seuss) that I read. NPR says:
The website io9.com, which appears to have broken the news, says the 91-year-old author of "The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked this Way Comes, and many more literary classics" died in Los Angeles, possibly early this morning. "We've got confirmation from the family as well as his biographer, Sam Weller," io9 adds.
gregladen | June 6, 2012D-Day was today in 1944. My father was involved. Wikipedia is silly. Kids these days have no idea. There is, of course, a classic movie on the topic.
The term "D-Day" is military for "The Day" just like "H-Hour" is military for "The Hour" on which something will happen. However, once D-Day happened everyone started to use the term "D-Day" to refer to this event. The idea is you can put the date "D-Day" in your planning documents and refer to it without having the date set, or if you do have the date set, to avoid saying the date out loud.
So, in English, in normal culture, D-Day is…
jdupuis | June 6, 2012
Real cost of the smartphone revolution
The rise of libre open access
25,000 signatures and still rolling: Implications of the White House petition
Technology Review Goes Digital First
Journalism: The best of times, and the worst of times
Publishers' Fallback Position (GSU decision)
What Does It Take to Evaluate Teaching?
2012 top ten trends in academic libraries: A review of the trends and issues affecting academic libraries in higher education
Value of Academic Libraries Summit White Paper
Andrew Keen: 'Social media is killing our species'
Tor Books Announces E-book Store: Doctorow, Scalzi…
sastyk | June 5, 2012The first person to ever refer to me as middle-aged in print was my friend Rod Dreher. On the one hand, I appreciated the publicity. On the other hand, I was 34 at the time, and I may never entirely forgive him. Still, the shock has waned, and I have come to terms with the fact that if I'm not middle aged now, I will officially be so on August 15 when I cross the line into my 40s.
To be absolutely honest, hitting middle age bothers me not in the slightest - my feeling is that every year that takes me away from being 14 is a really, really good one - and the further the better. I would go…
sastyk | June 5, 2012Greenpa asked me to talk about how we cook in the summer, and that's a very good subject to talk about - what does a woman who "dances with wood" and cooks on a wood cookstove all winter long do in the summer? Well, part of the answer is that when we're lazy, we use the electric stove that came with the house. Now from an environmental standpoint, electric stoves are a pretty lousy option. Using electricity to create heat mostly means burning coal in the US. Now my family purchases renewable electricity and also my region uses a fair bit of hydro-power, but that's something of a grey area…
aardvarchaeology | June 4, 2012This has me excited! The Board of the Swedish Skeptics just decided on a date and a city for the 14th European Skeptics Conference: 23-25 August 2013, Stockholm, Sweden. Check it out!
The Swedish Skeptics Association (Föreningen Vetenskap och Folkbildning) invites skeptics worldwide, and particularly in Europe, to the 14th European Skeptics Conference, 23-25 August 2013, in Stockholm, Sweden. (No, not 2012, when it would interfere with the Mayan apocalypse.) The conference is one in the series supported by the European Council of Skeptical Organisations.
The organisers wish to hear ASAP from…
gregladen | June 3, 2012Tonight, on Skeptically Speaking, Desiree Schell will interview Bruce Schneier, author of Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive. From the Amazon page, the author notes: "This book represents my attempt to develop a full-fledged theory of coercion and how it enables compliance and trust within groups. My goal is to rephrase some of those questions and provide a new framework for analysis. I offer new perspectives, and a broader spectrum of what's possible. Perspectives frame thinking, and sometimes asking new questions is the catalyst to greater understanding.…
gregladen | June 1, 2012The study is on Science and Society and they would like you to fill out a survey. Thanks.
The link to the study is here.
pronald | May 31, 2012
A few years ago, Slate journalist Daniel Engber, wrote a provocative, and I think highly accurate, article describing the corporate strategy of "manufactured uncertainty" that was used for years to question the scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes cancer. Similarly, he argues, some environmental activists use the same approach to challenge the scientific consensus that the GE crops currently on the market or safe to eat and beneficial for the environment. "If private industry can bewitch the government with contrarian science, so, too, can they. ..Doubt is their product, too,…
jhalper | May 31, 2012Would you learn a language by taking a written text and changing letters here and there, or moving a few words around, and asking whether the meaning has changed? That may not be the most efficient way to learn French, but a Weizmann Institute scientist is betting that it will be a very useful way to improve our grasp of what is written in our DNA. Prof. Eran Segal, a computer scientist cum biologist, and his team developed a quick method for rewriting DNA that enables thousands of changes to be created at once, each in its own little, living cell, and measuring the effects of each such…
gregladen | May 30, 2012DJ Grothe has done some great things and he's taken the James Randi Educational Foundation a long way; he's made an important mark and we should all appreciate him and his prior efforts. Hell, we should create an award named after him and give it to people every year. Thank you DJ Grothe for all you've done for the skeptic movement.
Read the rest here.